Margaret Atwood says to save stories like pieces of bent wire; popstar Dua Lipa recommends a shelf of novels. This is the Hay Festival, full of creativity and hope.
A cynical view of literature festivals would be that they are marketing vehicles that serve to provide promotional opportunities for authors and stimulate sales of their books. No value judgment here—it’s important to enable writers and thinkers to live off their craft and there is no better way to do that than financial support of their creative outputs. A more hopeful view of large literary gatherings would be that they offer space for writers and readers to ponder big ideas, exchange views about their favorite novels, discuss the nuts and bolts of writing, and brainstorm solutions to the contemporary global challenges we’re facing.
This year, the literary festival in the quaint Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, dubbed “the Woodstock of the mind” by Bill Clinton, featured English-speaking writers covering pretty much everything over the course of eleven days, from fiction, history , and politics to sustainability, the environment, science and technology, economics, and global affairs. If other literature festivals have something to learn from Hay, it would be ensuring that there are topics for everyone, and a space for debate, discussion, and—of course—reading. Rather astonishingly, the festival had world-famous singer Dua Lipa as one of its headliners, alongside Margaret Atwood and a surprise pre-recoded appearance from Salman Rushdie. For literature purists, the latter two are the unquestionable stars of events like this, and Margaret Atwood’s three separate appearances were indeed sold out.
Life Advice from Margaret Atwood
In addition to insights on her creative process and reflections on the recent loss of her partner, Atwood, sharp as ever, blessed the audience with impromptu life advice casually interwoven with her reflections on writing and literature. Her secret to a satisfying life is simple: “I had no expectations. If you have high aspirations and low expectations, you’re never disappointed.”
Another piece of wisdom was more practical. “Never throw away a bendy piece of wire—you never know, you may use them someday,” she stressed, in all seriousness. Atwood is not wasteful when it comes to her ideas, creativity, or anything else. She talked about keeping all sorts of items in her house that might eventually be of use—and about doing the same thing with stories. Her latest book, Old Babes in the Wood, is a collection of stories that grew out of the literary equivalent of bendy pieces of wire: faced with a choice to develop them further or throw them away, she decided to do the former. When it comes to the craft of writing, she believes that the author’s job is not only to express themselves but to evoke something for the reader. She warned against being too prescriptive in fiction: “If your responsibility as a writer wasn’t to the book and the reader, you wouldn’t be a writer, you would be a sermonizer and people would be turned off.” She emphasized that style is key: “If you can’t interest me in the first five pages, I won’t be interested in your message.” And she entertained the crowd with an anecdote about being so immersed in children’s films on a long-haul flight that she forgot her laptop on the plane,Testaments and proving that even one of the greatest novelists of our time is still human. To me, Atwood was the irrefutable supernova of the festival, making the audience laugh, tear up, reflect, and walk away in awe of her wit.
Reading in the Age of the Internet: Pop Stars and BookTok
A curious addition to the festival lineup was Dua Lipa, the English-Albanian award-winning singer and songwriter, who was invited to share her perspective on books as an avid reader. Is inviting pop stars to literature festivals the only way to encourage young people to attend them? In a world dominated by social media and digital platforms, megastars can attract new audiences to book-focused events. I doubt that the crowds of exuberant teenagers screaming “We love you, Dua! You are the queen!” as soon as she appeared on stage came to Hay for Douglas Stuart, the Scottish writer she was interviewing about his novel about a boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s post-industrial, working-class Glasgow. The hope is that after listening to Lipa’s skillful questioning and witnessing her genuine fascination with the book, young fans left Hay more curious about reading, if not Stuart’s work, then one of many others available at the world’s biggest pop-up bookshop hosted by the festival. Lipa curated her own shelf there, with recommended books including works by Haruki Murakami, Roxane Gay, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bernardine Evaristo, and Tomasz Jędrowski. By the end of the festival, the titles from her shelf were completely sold out. Dua Lipa has a huge audience and reach, and she has consequently been using her platform to promote reading, with her sessions at Hay marking the launch of her very own book club and providing an insight into the novels that influenced her. Literary purists, however, would perhaps frown upon the idea that the most anticipated act of one of the greatest literary festivals in the world is not a writer, and lament the kind of future that this signals for the entire writing industry.
Has writing (and reading) become so obsolete that, for it to stay relevant, it needs to be spiced up with singers and TikTok influencers to appeal to the digital natives? One problem of the literary universe has been its elitism, and mixing the high-brow, traditional literary spaces with low-brow entertainment at book-focused festivals could serve as a clever way of inviting new communities and generations into this conversation. The trick would be to blend the two in a manner that encourages synergy and opens new audiences to content they wouldn’t normally care to see. How about a double-ticketing system where if you go to see Dua Lipa, you also need to attend Peter Frankopan’s talk about environmental history and how humans transformed the Earth, or Faiza Shaheen’s on economic inequality? Or if your festival agenda is filled with topics like politics, economics, and environment, you’d be sent to events focused on lighthearted storytelling and comedy, or perhaps encouraged to spend some time in the on-site yoga studio or the TikTok booth. Brief conversations with TikTok book influencers reassured me that young people indeed do read—a lot. Being a part of a virtual community of readers enables them to discuss the books and exchange recommendations, taking the solitary act of reading into a social universe. They are shaping up to become a powerful force that will influence the industry in the coming years—they actively support and crowdfund self-published books to help authors rejected by traditional publishers. They want to read what they want, not what publishing houses pay for. Perhaps we should see BookTok and similar initiatives as GenZ’s version of literature festivals, where you don’t have to leave your bedroom in order to discuss your favorite books, and the conversation doesn’t have a one-hour time cap. What the organizers of Hay did brilliantly was to bring these two worlds together to collaborate, not collide, and deployed young influencers to spread the word about the event and authors it featured.
In a vibrant discussion on the power of storytelling and the role of books in providing shelter, solace, and hope in times of upheaval, Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak said that ideas need freedom in order to thrive. Perhaps this is ultimately what literature festivals are for—providing a free, safe space for thinkers to challenge and shape one another.
Read similar:
